1993 - In the Place of Fallen Leaves (10 page)

“That’s good. Do remember me to him. Now, would you two care to help me? Or are you as big a layabout as my son, Alison?”

§

Johnathan’s mother had trained to be a social worker and his father did all the housework. He had a collection of notebooks filled with his own grandmother’s recipes and was using them, according to Johnathan, as the basis for research into the lost art of English cooking. Johnathan said they didn’t see much of his mother, who came home from work late and exhausted, and he’d given up talking to her about anything because she only interrupted and told him of people whose problems were unimaginably greater than any of his trivial anxieties and he should realize how fortunate he was.

Johnathan’s father fetched a cardboard box of dusty jamjars and filled the sink with hot, suddy water. We rolled up our sleeves and sponged the jars clean: their Mayonnaise and Peanut Butter labels slid off the hot glass and floated scummily in the sink. Johnathan’s father quartered a couple of lemons, twisted a muslin sachet around them and lowered it on a piece of string into the vast pan of bubbling apples and blackberries. His face, already ruddy from the heat, was reddened further by the glow from the volcanic fruit.

“Come on, you two. We need them dried as well. Here’s a cloth, Alison.”

Soon the draining-board was covered with gleaming jamjars. Johnathan’s father took a saucer and spooned a little jam onto it.

“Just a smidgin,” he said absently, and then to me: “Now just prod it with your finger.”

The skin on the jam crinkled. “It’s ready!” he cried. “Let’s not waste time. You hold the jars, Johnathan, I’ll pour it.”

The sizzling jam made the jars hot, but Johnathan didn’t flinch. He was enjoying himself. I sealed the jars, easing rubber bands over their necks, although they tried to slide up my fingers, while the Viscount wrote labels and stuck them on.

“We’d better test it, don’t you think?” he suggested, when he’d licked the last label, and we sipped tea with a thick wedge of home-made white bread and warm jam.

§

Dozily vindictive wasps darted at me, tiny black and yellow bullies, as I walked home along the lane. When I got in mother sent me straight out again to look for eggs. The hens were scrawny and dishevelled, and pecked at each other when I scattered a handful of corn each morning. They kept themselves alive only by extracting some illusory nutrition from the grit they pecked from the farmyard and passed through their digestive tracts, producing smooth and perfectly shaped eggshells that had no yolk inside. They’d scrutinize me, beady eyes full of resentment, and take their revenge by dreaming up new places to lay their useless eggs, watching with inscrutable satisfaction as I searched in all the corners of the barn and underneath rusting machinery, amongst the remnants of straw and on the stone lintels, between discarded feed bags and in the back of the trailer. But there were always some I wouldn’t find for weeks, without realizing how old they were, like the one Ian picked up at breakfast one day to prove you couldn’t crack an egg by squeezing its ends, such was the extraordinary strength of its shape, it just happened to be a physical impossibility, Ian said, a fact he’d proved in the early hours by mathematical calculation, only for Tom to take it from him, stand up and close his fist: rotten egg-white exploded between his fingers and polluted the kitchen with an acrid stench that put everyone off their breakfast and took mother all morning to scrub off the walls.

I threw pebbles at the hens and that made them jump and squawk. They couldn’t fly because mother clipped their wings with an old pair of scissors. What I really wanted was to learn how to slaughter them properly. One day in June mother said she was going to kill a scrawny, featherless chicken that was being picked on by the others, and I thought I’d surprise her. I cornered it in the yard and tried to wring its thin neck like I’d seen her do so often. It wasn’t difficult. But then instead of dying it jumped up and beetled around the yard making a hell of a racket, with its head lolling to one side. Mother came out and finished it off with a cleaver, and forbade me to touch the chickens again.

“Just collect the bloody eggs, girl!” she shouted. “Can’t you do nothin’ right?”

I found one solitary egg and gave it to mother and then I heard the ice-cream van coming from a long way off, its tune losing coherence in the thin air and sounding like the accordion player at the previous year’s barn dance.

“Oh stop moaning,” said mother; she gave me some money and I ran across the yard. Whenever we heard that lopsided tune it made our mouths water, but after the first couple of weeks of that parch-mouthed summer it augured only disappointment, for the laconic ice-cream man had fast run out of everything except the bland cornet-wafers that grown-ups preferred. He made no apologies, blaming his shortage on us for overbuying, and he never smiled even though he could keep cool by putting his hands in his ice-box.

Three times a week we heard his wonky bell, and every time had to go through the same charade:

“Choc split, please.”

“Ain’t got no choc splits,” he replied lugubriously.

“Lemon sparkle then.”

“Ain’t got they neither.”

“You got nut cream?”

“No.”

We soon tired of his litany of unavailable delights, and demanded to know what he did have, but he wouldn’t be forestalled.

“Just ask, that’s all, and I’ll tell you.”

“You got chocwhoppers?”

“No.”

“What about orange maid?”

“No.”

We knew he was playing us along. He wasn’t an ice-cream man at all, his real job was to teach us by example the Devon sense of humour. But our greed and the fact that he didn’t give the game away with so much as a smile or a smirk combined to tantalize us right to the last fanciful delicacy. Then, hands in pockets, we’d slope away from his van. He waited a few crucial seconds, and then called after us: “I got wafers. Get yer mum one.”

Mother always acted surprised. She’d give me some more money for lemonade as consolation and retreat to the cool little scullery with her wafer, where she could savour each lick before it melted. Daddy was pleased with his too but he swallowed it in a couple of gollops like a dog, while I scurried off to the shop.

It was always dim in Elsie’s tiny front room. Even during that brightest of summers, when the sun sought out forgotten shadows in the nooks and crannies of ill-thought-out cottages, revealing long-lost pencils and socks and out-of-date coins, still she kept the blinds down and a low-wattage light bulb always on. Elsie and Stuart, her fiancé, were sitting in their easy chairs on either side of the room, surrounded by shelves of chocolate bars developing a white bloom, and teeth-cracking gobstoppers and liquorice chews that still cost a halfpenny, so that you had to buy two at a time. The shop never closed, even when they went to bed. We used to wait till the lights went out and then go in: they were the last people to lock their doors. The bell above the door brought one or the other of them stumbling down through the dark in their night dress, to sell you a small Kit-Kat or a bubble-gum and then go back to bed.

They’d been holding hands across the small space in the middle of the room, but I crept up to the door and as I opened it their hands snapped apart like an overstretched rubber band.

When I asked for a bottle of lemonade Stuart struggled grimly to his feet. Both he and Elsie grew smaller every year, and that summer we were all three the same height for the first and last time. Stuart hobbled out to the back shed; he’d only recently stopped making deliveries, incipient arthritis exacerbated by the steep paths of the village.

Elsie stared at me through pebble-glass spectacles, her eyes huge like an owl’s. Stuart shuffled back with a dusty bottle. I opened it back home and found a yellowy film sitting on top of the liquid. Once I put a bottle of lemonade in the freezer overnight, but the piskies got in there like they got everywhere else and blew it up. So now I filled a big cider mug with ice, which inspired a whisper of bubbles in the flat lemonade, and I drank without stopping.

§

That was the summer when even abstemious men, soon to be joined by my brother Tom, at the end of another useless, dried-up day, would walk over the back of Rydon Farm at dusk to slake their thirst in the pub at Ashton. Some evenings the car park would be empty but the pub full. They imposed their taciturn nature on the clientele, who became incensed at having the good-humoured atmosphere that hung in their pub shot through with tables of sullen silence. An age-old animosity, towards men whose ancestors had left their poachers’ bullets in the church door during the Civil War, bubbled up in the present, at first in sarcastic comments in the Public Bar and beer spilt by accident. It grew into threats by the dartboard, developed into scuffles in the Gentlemen’s toilet, and culminated one Friday night in a magnificent brawl in the car park, which it took a vanload of policemen to break up, made the front-page headline of the Exeter
Express and Echo
, brought condemnation, from the local Member of Parliament, of the escalation of rural violence, and was the one real respite that Tom would have from his despair.

§

While I drank my lemonade in the kitchen the boys relaxed before tea in front of the six o’clock news. I could hear them cursing at the screen, their voices less lifelike than the sound of distant warfare between the police and the miners coming from the picket-lines.

“Go on, give ‘im one, the fat bastard!” said Ian.

I could hear the rattling of shields, and men chanting like animals. It sounded as if they were just along the lane, coming down out of the forest.

“Look at the size of they bloody horses!” said grandfather.

“He’ll break the bastard’s skull like that,” said Ian.

“Christ Almighty,” Tom murmured, and they went silent.

§

Really, though, I didn’t bother with television, I don’t know why; I hardly ever watched TV. I knew it wasn’t as good as it had been before I was born, when it was brought to the village as one of grandmother’s miracles of electricity. She said they’d discovered how to show people’s auras, only colour pictures were so confusing they’d lost the art. She said they’d been able to confirm that history is a spiral, and that the future is present in the past, by showing snow falling on a summer’s day. That was back when her cataracts were only partial, and now she was glad she couldn’t watch any more, so she took her place at table in plenty of time for tea, joined by the rest of us when mother announced that it was ready. Only grandfather wasn’t there, because even in that summer of sombre evenings when there was no work to be done, he had little inclination to come in before dusk, and would busy himself taking down some wire fencing and putting it up again a fraction tighter, or inspecting the disenchanted three-month-old lambs he’d inspected the evening before, or some such other superfluous task, in order to avoid having to join his family indoors before dusk.

Mother dolloped helpings of cauliflower cheese with mashed potato and scraggy carrots onto our plates, and poured pint mugs of tea for Ian and Tom.

“I was lookin’ at the orchard s’afternoon,” she told them. “We’ll not get much off of they apples and pears.”

“True, ‘tis too late for they, whatever ‘appens,” replied Ian. “The wheat’ll be all right though, ‘tis the late crop I’s worried about.”

“What about the animals? The sheep’s is got no flesh under their wool, mother,” said Tom. “I still don’t know why us got so many; they’ll starve if this goes on much longer.”

“That don’t matter. I told ‘ee enough times, bay,” said Ian, grinning, “us gets the subsidy for puttin’ ‘em out on the hill, not bringin’ ‘em back in.”

“Well, they’s just skin and bones. If it dudn’t rain soon grandfather says ‘twill be worse than last time, when the earth swallowed lambs, and they only went out at dusk to pick up the dead cows—”

“—you’s always so pessimistic, bay,” mother interrupted. “Long’s us can keep our stock alive while others’ is dyin’, come the end of all this we’ll be well all right.”

“Course we will, Tom,” I said.

“Don’t cheek your older brother, Alison,” said mother.

“Stupid maid,” said Tom, his mouth full of a chomped-up mess of cauliflower.

I ignored him and nudged Daddy. “What’s that you got in your pocket? There’s always somethin’.” He managed to hide things there when I wasn’t looking.

Now his face turned quizzical as he felt around and produced three small toads in his palm, which he laid on the table. They hopped off in different directions. Mother sat rigidly upright as if it was a personal insult, then smiled smugly, to show that she had a sense of humour, and grandmother screwed up her face in concentration, trying to make out by the sounds what was going on; Ian and I fell about giggling while Tom, ever practical, leaned over and picked each of them up.

“What’ll you do with ‘em?” I cried. “Don’t you kill ‘em!”

“I’ll just put ‘em outside.”

“I wanna take ‘em to the stream,” I pleaded.

“They wants a pond, not a stream,” he pointed out.

“Tom, let Alison take ‘em, why not?” Ian suggested.

I made a bowl with my hands and the toads huddled in a slimy cluster. Daddy followed me outside and came with me to the goldfish pond in the garden of the empty house next door, not yet occupied by summer visitors.

I set the toads down beside the olid water. They hovered there like tiny garden ornaments, petrified by indecision. “Go on and swim then,” I told them, but they wouldn’t move, so we left them to it. I gave Daddy my clammy hand on the way back: he was trembling. But as we crossed the farmyard I realized it was me.

Mother was washing up. I heard Daddy say: “Er’s got the crinkum crankums.”

“I’m all right,” I said.

“You better get on up to bed, maid, you looks tired,” said mother.

My room was growing dark but it was still light outside as I sat on the window-sill; nightfall would bring only fleeting relief in that oven of a summer, when even my insides seemed to be cooking. At least it started me reading, as I tried to take my mind away from physical discomfort with the only books we had in the house, grandmother’s single shelf of leatherbound English literature she’d brought with her from her father’s house up on the moor. They were the one thing that saved my face with Johnathan, who as we lay on the rock by the quarry pool discussed the habits and opinions of characters from books as if they were personal friends, since he didn’t have any real-life ones of his own.